The WNBA is on the verge of a landmark labor deal, but not everyone is celebrating. A proposed supermax salary could create a million-dollar player while crippling team depth.

WNBA will now have its first-ever million-dollar-salaried player. But The Comeback’s Qwame Skinner believes, “This could get ugly”.

“The league’s latest offer proposes a supermax base salary of roughly $1,130,000,” Skinner wrote. “Which would be 20% of the proposed $5.65 million salary cap for Year 1 of the CBA.”

This will be tough on players down the roster. Front Office Sports gives an example of how challenging this could be for the Indiana Fever as they build a franchise around Caitlin Clark.

“If the Fever paid Kelsey Mitchell the $1.13 million supermax and spent a combined $1.08 million on Boston and Caitlin Clark’s mandated rookie-scale salaries, that would leave the team with roughly $3.4 million to spend on nine more roster spots, including newly drafted players... This equates to roughly $382,200, or 6.7% of the cap per player, and that’s if Indiana has only one max player on its roster. This is almost $100,000 less than the proposed average salary.”

Essentially, the big stars will get the lion's share of payments, while rookies might be low payments based on this arrangement.

And all these do not look too well for the 2026 season, which is set to tip off in May.

The 2026 Season May Be Up for a Delay

The league already criticised the players' proposals of a $9.5 million salary cap, 27.5% gross revenue share and 25% gross revenue share in the first year as “unrealistic”, which “would cause hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for our teams.”

Moreover, they have fixed March 10 as the deadline for a settlement. “The sides have blown several deadlines and are rapidly closing in on the May 8 scheduled start date for the season,” according to Front Office Sports.

But that won’t be as easy. A player has spoken to ESPN, maintaining anonymity, that the players will much rather sit out that signing whatever is presented.

“I think [the league and owners] just feel that we’re gonna just sign, and we’re not. We’re gonna just sit out if that’s the case. Like, we deserve it,” she said. And this hints directly at a season delay. The last time the CBA negotiations took place in the early 2000s, there was a similar situation. Do you think we'll have a repeat?

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Written by

Deblina Roy

Edited by

Siddharth Shirwadkar